Have we seen the better days? - by Maxwell Okikiola

When I wrote that Nigeria has seen better days, when I wrote that it doesn't get better than this, people probably thought I was being a little insane, maybe even too pessimistic. But truth be told, bad governance might not be our only great undoing in Nigeria. The average Nigerian, in one way or another, participates in things that are wrong, and some are breaking laws sometimes without even realizing that they are doing anything wrong. From destroying public property and vandalizing infrastructure to putting another citizen's life at risk, these things happen so often that people have started treating them as normal. Let's bring it down to something as ordinary as the workman market. If you need something fixed, there is almost never a fixed price. The repairer will look at you, calculate how much he thinks you can afford, and give you a price that makes you wonder whether money grows on trees. And you have to haggle, haggle, and haggle just to get something close to a reasonable price. I know this because I once took up an apprenticeship to learn cable wiring, around 2010, and that was when I started seeing how some of these things worked. Let's say your fan has a bad capacitor. The capacitor might cost ₦500. The repairer could tell you it costs ₦5,000, then add another ₦2,000 for the labour. Something that should reasonably cost around ₦1,500 ends up costing you ₦7,000. Is that profit, or is that simply taking advantage of someone because you know they don't know the actual price? And it isn't just repairers. Just last week, Tiara wanted to paint her new apartment. She got a painter, and the amount he quoted was so exorbitant that she decided to do the job herself. She went to the market, priced the materials, and realized that doing everything herself would be way, way cheaper than what the painter had quoted. So she painted the apartment herself. And honestly, why not? These are things you can sometimes work around. But not everyone has the time, knowledge, strength, or opportunity to do that. When people deliberately inflate prices because they know someone has no choice, they are making life harder for another citizen. And the worst part is that we have normalized it. Then let's talk about people who take contracts from the government or from companies. A budget is prepared. A spreadsheet tells you what needs to be bought, how much it should cost, and how the work should be done. But somewhere along the line, someone decides they can make their own money from the project. So they manipulate the figures, buy cheaper materials, pocket the difference, and pass the same mentality down to whoever is working beneath them. The person at the bottom does the same thing. Eventually, everybody takes a little something from the project until what is left is mediocre material, poor workmanship, and a structure that begins falling apart almost immediately. You see roads that were supposedly fixed only months ago becoming damaged again. You see furniture that should last for years falling apart within months. You see buildings and public projects deteriorating because everybody involved was more interested in what they could personally gain than in the quality of what they were supposed to deliver. And people are putting other people's lives at risk without a second thought. As long as they are making their money, they don't care. These are some of the things we need to confront as citizens. What about smokers who throw their waste wherever they please? What about agberos terrorizing people in communities? What about the people who disturb the peace and make life unbearable for everyone around them? Now imagine the government suddenly decided to start arresting everyone involved in these things. There would be an uproar. The same people who complain about bad governance would come out to protest that the government was terrorizing citizens. Families would defend people who had spent years terrorizing their own communities. That is the contradiction we have created. There is so much decay in this society, and it runs much deeper than politics. Government is part of the problem, absolutely. But a country is also made up of its citizens, and when corruption, exploitation, dishonesty, negligence, and disregard for other people's lives become normal behaviour, fixing the government alone cannot fix the country. The decay runs so deep that expecting Nigeria to suddenly rise from the ashes like a phoenix would require something close to a miracle. And I don't see that miracle happening anytime soon. For years, we've been saying, "Nigeria go better." But somehow, the more we say it, the worse things seem to become. So, have we actually seen better days? Has Nigeria really seen better days?

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